9424246 Leventhal This award will provide partial support for a science symposium on "Clusters, Lensing, and the Future of the Universe", June 26-28, 1995, at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland. The University of Maryland, Department of Astronomy, is hosting the annual meeting of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) from June 24-28, 1995. As part of this meeting, the Department of Astronomy has sole responsibility for organizing a Science Symposium. The title of the symposium is "Clusters, Lensing, and the Future of the Universe". It will be held at the College Park, Maryland campus of the University of Maryland from June 26 to 28 , 1995. It is anticipated that approximately 150 professional astronomers will attend and participate in the symposium. A smaller and unknown number of amateur astronomers are also likely to attend. The primary purpose of this symposium is to bring together people working on three of the major unsolved problems of modern astrophysics, in the expectation that the problems (and their hoped-for solutions) have aspects in common. Roughly, the questions can be phrased as (a) How should we describe the largest-scale structures in the universe? (b) How did the structures form without producing stronger imprints in the cosmic microwave background radiation? and (c) Which values of the standard cosmological parameters and of the inflationary universe model parameters best describe the universe during the epoch of galaxy formation, the present time, and the long range future? The intended format of the symposium includes about 20 reviews by invited speakers, each accompanied by a couple of shorter contributed talks; and a number of poster paper contributions on related topics.
